The Conqueror | Page 2

duties devolved
upon the Governor of Nevis until the crown heard of its loss and made
choice of another to fill that high and valued office. She had a Council
and a House of Assembly, modelled in miniature upon the Houses of
Peers and Commons; and was further distinguished as possessing the
only court in the English Antilles where pirates could be tried. The
Council was made up of ten members appointed by the
Captain-General, but commanded by "its own particular and private
Governor." The freeholders of the Island chose twenty-four of their
number to represent them in the House of Assembly; and the few
chronicles of that day agree in asserting that Nevis during her hundred

proud years of supremacy was governed brilliantly and well. But the
careful administration of good laws contributed in part only to the
celebrity of an Island which to-day, still British as she is, serves but as
a pedestal for the greatest of American statesmen. In these old days she
was a queen as well as a mother. Her planters were men of immense
wealth and lived the life of grandees. Their cane-fields covered the
mountain on all its sides and subsidiary peaks, rising to the very fringe
of the cold forest on the cone of a volcano long since extinct. The
"Great Houses," built invariably upon an eminence that commanded a
view of the neighbouring islands.--St. Christopher, Antigua,
Montserrat,--were built of blocks of stone so square and solid and with
a masonry so perfect that one views their ruins in amazement to-day.
They withstood hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and tidal waves. They
were impregnable fortresses against rioting negroes and spasmodically
aggressive Frenchmen. They even survived the abolition of slavery, and
the old gay life went on for many years. English people, bored or in
search of health, came for the brilliant winter, delighted with the
hospitality of the planters, and to renew their vitality in the famous
climate and sulphur baths, which, of all her possessions, Time has
spared to Nevis. And then, having weathered all the ills to which even a
West Indian Island can be subject, she succumbed--to the price of sugar.
Her great families drifted away one by one. Her estates were given over
to the agent for a time, finally to the mongoose. The magnificent stone
mansions, left without even a caretaker, yielded helplessly to the
diseases of age, and the first hurricane entering unbarred windows
carried their roofs to the sea. In Charles Town, the capital since the
submergence of James Town in 1680, are the remains of large town
houses and fine old stone walls, which one can hardly see from the
roadstead, so thick are the royal palms and the cocoanut trees among
the ruins, wriggling their slender bodies through every crevice and
flaunting their glittering luxuriance above every broken wall.
But in the days when the maternal grandparents of Alexander Hamilton
looked down a trifle upon those who dwelt on other isles, Nevis recked
of future insignificance as little as a beauty dreams of age. In the
previous century England, after the mortification of the Royalists by
Cromwell, had sent to Nevis Hamiltons, Herberts, Russells, and many

another refugee from her historic houses. With what money they took
with them they founded the great estates of the eighteenth century, and
their sons sent their own children to Europe to become accomplished
men and women. Government House was a miniature court, as gay and
splendid as its offices were busy with the commerce of the world. The
Governor and his lady drove about the Island in a carriage of state, with
outriders and postilions in livery. When the Captain-General came he
outshone his proud second by the gorgeousness of his uniform only,
and both dignitaries were little more imposing than the planters
themselves. It is true that the men, despite their fine clothes and
powdered perukes, preferred a horse's back to the motion of a
lumbering coach, but during the winter season their wives and
daughters, in the shining stuffs, the pointed bodices, the elaborate
head-dress of Europe, visited Government House and their neighbours
with all the formality of London or Bath. After the first of March the
planters wore white linen; the turbaned black women were busy among
the stones of the rivers with voluminous wardrobes of cambric and
lawn.
Several estates belonged to certain offshoots of the ducal house of
Hamilton, and in the second decade of the eighteenth century Walter
Hamilton was Captain-General of the English Leeward Caribbees and
"Ordinary of the Same." After him came Archibald Hamilton, who was,
perhaps, of all the Hamiltons the most royal in his hospitality.
Moreover, he was a person of energy and ambition, for it is on record
that he paid a visit to Boston, fleeing from the great